Hi guys

At the moment i am making a Nuclear Reactor simulator and i want to come up with some way (or formula) that will determin the temperature of the reactor. The temp. can not exceed 800 C and the following are factors:

Primary coolant fluid
Control Rods
Fuel left
Emergancy coolant

Think thats it, any ideas?

 

There is likely to be a relationship between neutron flux and the heat developed. The type of reactor and the working fluid have mutual effects as well.

You could always have fun and model the Russian RBMK type graphite pile reactor. Watch the start-up, though.

 

As long as you are happy with simulations and are not building a real one is fine.

 

yup, no real ones here

Im just a little annoyed at the sim though, because it has no "randomness" so it is very easy to get a constant temperature and not have spikes or uncertanties

 

So to add to your identification of science,

If it glows = Nuclear.

 

Thanks for the indent. scien.

 

Watch the very bad movie "China Syndrome". You may not want too much randomness. Also look at the history of the British Windhill reactor, as well as that RBMK at Chernobyl in Russia.

 

British Windhill reactor? nothing on it in google

 

That might have been Windscale - http://www.nucleartourist.com/events/windscal.htm

I never get the name right on that one.

 

OK, cant find the film China syndrome so im going to get that on amazon. Why did you want me to look at these anyway?

At the end of the day, all i want is a nice formula or system where the temperature depends on variable, and that the temperature is not 100% predictable

 

The film was pretty hokey, but it had the fortune to come out around the same time as the Three Mile Island fiasco. Basically it describes a scenario where the core melt out of control, and starts burning a hole to China. Our nuclear disaster was an equipment blip, but the Russians showed us how to really stage a nuclear disaster.

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/index.html

 

The Brits beat Chernobyl by 40-some years. It (Windscale) was a similar design that burned the graphite core for several days. At least it did not explode.

The whole point is to illustrate why variability in reactor cores is not a warm and fuzzy idea. Everything needs to be very boringly predictable.

 

For some engineering details and formulas, I'd recommend getting a text on reactor engineering. I have one that was my father-in-law's, as he worked on reactor instrumentation in the 50's: "Principles of Nuclear Reactor Engineering" by Glasstone, VNR, 1955. I've browsed through it and it's an excellent text. I'd imagine one could be found in a used bookstore or web bookseller for a few bucks/quid.

The randomness you desire probably won't come from the equations used to model things (unless the system's time evolution is chaotic) -- you'll have to add that behavior in empirically.

 

One of the problems with Three Mile Island (as I recall) is their "sensor" for a valve was a flip flop. Problem was, the valve didn't always toggle properly, so the indicator got out of sync with the actual state of the valve. Someone saved a few buck in other words.

 

lol, someone saved a few bucks

 

If you want to expand your understanding of people and manipulation of data, look at the response to the accident. The actual release of radiation was very small, but the anti-nuclear interests played up the what-might-have-happened aspects until it sounded like the entire East Coast of the U.S. was threatened.

The plant management, realizing that careers were on the line, refused to take sensible action until things were awfully far along. That did not help the reporting of the accident, which should have been fairly trivial.

Those old 1950's design boiling water reactors are not very impressive in action, either. No reasonable superheat to the generated steam, so plant efficiency is very low.